


монолит

by ginkyou



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brainwashing, Broken Bones, Gen, Memory Loss, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-06-08 06:13:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6842158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginkyou/pseuds/ginkyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky wakes up after Steve and Tony have knocked each other unconscious and finds himself trapped between old memories and new commands.</p><p>Set during the final fight between Steve and Tony during the end of Civil War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> монолит, russ.  
> Monolith (n.):  
> 1\. a single great stone often in the form of an obelisk or column  
> 2\. a massive structure  
> 3\. an organized whole that acts as a single unified powerful or influential force  
> 4\. a type of codeword, usually spelled in Russian phonetics, used in transmissions by Soviet Russian number stations

Bucky gasped awake to the feeling of his leg muscles straining under his skin. The super serum was already hard at work in him, rebuilding torn cell walls and setting broken bones. He groaned. The concrete under him felt like ice. He could feel little pieces of iron sticking out of his skin and his mind was reeling. Bits and pieces of his memories flashed in his head, sparks of things he once knew becoming clear for a millisecond and then fading away again. Places he had seen and faces he had loved blinking in and out of existence like images shown on a malfunctioning TV set. Images of a battle, a smile, a hug, clear in one moment, gone in the next.

Bucky pressed his remaining hand against the concrete and pushed himself up into a sitting position. His bruised body ached but felt surprisingly light. Parts of broken machinery in his shoulder whirred helplessly, iron muscles flailing. He looked around, the taste of blood slowly creeping from his tongue into his brain. There were two bodies on the ground, both parties knocked out. When he looked at them for too long, his mind spit images at him that stung like venom: a car crash, a battle, a fall. When he looked away, the images were gone, so he decided to keep looking away.

He dragged himself to one of the walls. Moving without his metal arm felt strange. There was no need to throw himself into his movements to counteract the momentum of the added weight at his side anymore. Part of him wished that not being half machine was something that didn't have to be strange to him. This part of him also wanted to jump and run and feel his body now that it was just _his body_ , just his own flesh and blood and nothing else weighing him down, but that part of him was still called James Buchanan Barnes and according to the images that made it through the static in his mind James Buchanan Barnes was dead.

Bucky let his upper body rest against the concrete. It would take just a few more moments before the gift science had pumped into his blood would heal him enough to let him walk out of there. Just a few more deep breaths. His legs still felt like they were in no position to have weight put upon them. Even with the serum he would probably limp for a day or two. But first, he had to get out of there. The other two would recover soon and then they would go at each other again, and if he was still there by the time they woke up he wasn't sure if he would make it out of there alive. Just a few more moments.

The room was eerily quiet. Snow drifted in from the cracked missile hatch and the open windows, originally designed to be vents for the fiery exhaust of a starting rocket. Bucky watched the snowflakes fall around him and let his brain continue to vomit random scraps of memories at him. Some of the images were surprisingly pleasant. A kiss. A joke. A-- With a loud crack, his collarbone set itself back into position. Pain shot through him and he spat out an angry curse, grabbing the remains of his metal arm as it radiated through his upper body. He buried his fingers in the mess of machinery and wires that were still attached to his body and something in his shoulder, right where the metal arm had connected to his body, clicked softly.

He froze. A single lightbulb still hanging from a bit of untouched ceiling in the missile launch chamber that they had wrecked began to flicker. Bucky held his breath.

With a robotic hum, the facility around him awoke from its slumber.


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky staggered through bleak concrete hallways lit by flickering lights. His eyes were wide.

“Stand by. Stand by. Initializing emergency sequence. User recognized,” a male voice had said in Russian, and then it had said his name and then his mind had gone blank. When he had snapped out of his trance, the speaker had gone to static and he had felt like his entire world was unraveling before him.

He had looked at the men on the ground and he had known them but he had not known who they were. He had known that his name was Bucky but he hadn't known who Bucky was. His brain felt like it had lost its balance and stumbled into an abyss where past, present and future were all the same. Commands, memories, information were mixing up in his head, voices overlapping between his ears, number stations calling his name in code. He had to go inside – no, go outside – kill – no, spare – no, _kill_ – in Siberia – Zokovia – Russia – America – with a gun – a knife – his bare hands – three – two – one – cat – hawk – attention – attention – stand by – five – six – nine – benign – homecoming – one – freight car.

The one thing he had still known was that he had to get out of there, and he clung to that knowledge with all his might.

He didn't know what was waiting for him outside, had no memory of how he got there, but he had to make it there. They had told him that if something went wrong, he had to return to headquarters for debriefing and reassignment. Something had gone wrong, terribly, dangerously wrong, and he had to return to state the results of a task he could not even recall, and then he'd be washed clean. Maybe they would put him under again. An image flashed in his mind: a boy from Brooklyn. Bucky hoped fervently that they would put him under again.

He had a flashlight in his hand, his human hand, his bloodied, bruised, _human_ hand, the he could not remember picking up.

The way out was this way – no, that way – up – down – there were so many blueprints in his head, of hotels, of apartment buildings, of condos and trailers and parliaments, all overlapping, all seeming right and wrong at the same time. This deep into the facility there were no exit signs because nobody who did not know how to get out of here was supposed to be here. Normally he would have just climbed up over the rubble and out of the broken missile hatch, but with the strongest part of the machine that was his body gone he had no choice but to make his way through the maze of corridors hopefully leading to the outside.

Bucky's head was filled with grainy photos of latches and locks and meter-thick doors and he knew that parts of the complex would survive forever, encased in concrete and iron, designed to withstand thermo-nuclear war, built to last until long after mankind had wiped itself out. The problem was that his own body was not built to do so. He had to get out of there. There were two men in this facility with him, and they were threats – no, friends – no, targets – kill them – kill – **kill** – he couldn't trust his brain, he didn't have a brain, he was just a machine built to take orders.

Every part of the facility was freezing, made of concrete, abandoned years ago. Some parts of it had been supplied with rudimentary heating to ensure the computers and other machinery stored in the bunker's stomach would not freeze up, because if the machines died the super soldiers they had kept on ice would have died, too. Now, thanks to the destruction they had caused, even that heating was failing. Soon, Siberia's permafrost would creep into the building and swallow the entire complex whole. Not like it mattered anymore – the soldiers were already dead, the facility's most important treasures destroyed.

Beneath Bucky, under layers and layers of steel-reimbursed concrete, lay miles of hallways filled with the corpses of old computers, obsolete and unused for decades, missile launch codes stored safely in rotting containers. Even HYDRA had no use for these facilities built by the megalomaniac Soviet government and left behind as technology advanced, as command centers became glorified call centers and as super soldiers moved from concrete bunkers to glass towers. This facility was as obsolete as the Winter Soldier himself. This was a relic, a time capsule, and even though the air-tight closed doors should have sealed it away safely for eternity, time had its way of distorting door frames and cracking concrete and one day, even this facility would be gone.

Bucky paused in front of a pair of elevator doors. The power to them had been cut long before he had ever even heard of this facility, but that didn't mean he couldn't still use them. He half automatically reached forward to pull the doors open, already leaning into the movement and stumbling as only one hand made contact with the metal surface. The fact that he had lost his metal arm still hadn't quite registered. As he looked at his blurry reflection in the dulled metal, his mind slowly began to clear. What had happened when the switch in his arm had been flipped? The voice – had it given him orders? There was something he had to do, but what? The image of the boy from Brooklyn flashed before his eyes again. He gritted his teeth.

He could remember that the male voice speaking to him had said his name and had begun to give him a command, but then there had been sparks and smoke and static. No wonder his brain felt like it was trying to turn itself inside out. He had gone halfway through debriefing when something in the system must have failed, and he had never gotten his new assignment. In the absence of new orders his mind had grabbed onto the only goal he still had, to escape.

At least he was mostly in control of his brain again. The effects of the debriefing had worn off enough that he could think, instead of just leaving him trapped in a head filled with fog and angry memories. He didn't know where he was, but there were signs here, with arrows pointing in different directions. Bathrooms, read one. Room #4625, the other. He could not remember passing either.

Something felt strangely familiar about room #4625. He wasn't sure if that was good or bad, but familiarity was better than continuing to wander through hallways he had never seen before. He decided to take his chances with it.


	3. Chapter 3

The door to room #4625 looked no different than any other door Bucky had seen so far. It was made of thick steel and painted a sickly shade of green, with a small sign saying its room number next to it. Something in him shuddered at the idea of stepping into it. Another, bigger part of him knew he had to. Such were his orders.

He pushed the handle and the door opened quietly. Behind it lay a rotting carcass of a room. Half of the wall directly opposite to him was covered in moss, water trickling down the plants and darkening the concrete floor. To the right stood a wall of cathode ray tube monitors, only some of them still intact, at least half of them cracked and filled with the roots of strange, dark-leafed plants. A lone lightbulb blinked above Bucky's head, barely illuminating the space.

Bucky knew this room.

As he stepped through the door, a speaker, almost hidden under layers of dust and plant growth, crackled slightly.

“Stand by,” a female voice said, sounding slightly distorted. Something clicked behind the Soldier. Fear flashed in his mind for a brief second, adrenaline shooting through his veins as some buried memory clawed its way to the surface of his mind. He turned around. The door was shut. He tried the handle. It wouldn't move.

“User recognized. Winter Soldier,” it said. “Access granted.” Bucky tore at the door, the muscles in his arm straining as he tried to pull it open. The automatic locking mechanism was strong, but he had to be stronger. “Code Five Four Zhenya registered. Initializing briefing.” The groaning sound of metal grinding against metal filled the room as Bucky pulled at the door with all his strength. He just had to break the lock, then the door would open. “Five. Five. Seven. Three. G-E-O-L-O-G-Y.” Bucky's shoulders slumped. His hand slid off the deformed door handle. “Validity. Distinction.” His mind went blank. “Four. Eight. Over.” The Winter Soldier was ready. He had a mission. He had a target.

The target was Captain America.


End file.
